The present invention relates to a sheet-recognizing machine and more particularly to a sheet-recognizing machine or system for recognizing the type of a sheet or slip from acquired image data in accordance with sheet definition data stored in advance.
Generally, the format of a sheet such as a bill for public utilities charges and a statement of payment for taxes is defined by and changes with each business company or each local government. There are therefore several thousands types of sheet formats in the nation.
In order to realize efficient business management, financial agencies such as banks introduce an image processing system to process sheets. A sheet image processing system prepares a database storing sheet definition data for defining the types of sheets to automatically distinguish the type of each sheet by referring to the database. For example, refer to JP-A-11-167603.